Ninth City Burning

J. Patrick Black

Sep 2016 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

For fans of Ender’s Game, Red Rising, and The Hunger Games comes an explosive, epic science fiction debut...

Cities vanished, gone in flashes of world-shattering destruction. An alien race had come to make Earth theirs, bringing a power so far beyond human technology it seemed like magic. It was nearly the end of the world—until we learned to seize the power, and use it to fight back.
 
The war has raged for five centuries. For a cadet like Jax, one of the few who can harness the enemy’s universe-altering force, that means growing up in an elite military academy, training for battle at the front—and hoping he is ready. For Naomi, young nomad roaming the wilds of a ruined Earth, it means a daily fight for survival against the savage raiders who threaten her caravan.
 
When a new attack looms, these two young warriors find their paths suddenly intertwined. Together with a gifted but reckless military commander, a factory worker drafted as cannon fodder, a wild and beautiful gunfighter, and a brilliant scientist with nothing to lose—they must find a way to turn back the coming invasion, or see their home finally and completely destroyed.

Ratings and reviews

Ninth City Burning is the first book by J. Patrick Black so I wasn't sure what to expect. What I found was an amazingly complex novel and far more than I expected in a debut novel. This is a standalone with no cliffhanger, though it is open-ended for future books in what I hope will be a series. I really enjoyed this book and had a hard time putting it down. There is violence, as this book is about a war with an alien species. At times this novel seemed more like reading a textbook. Not surprising since the first part of the book is set in classrooms, with pre-teen and early-teen "kids". Ninth City Burning will appeal to those those readers who are more left-brained. Other readers will find parts of it, especially in the beginning, too dry and too educational. It gets better if you keep on reading through the dry parts. The book blurb adequately describes the storyline so I'm not going to repeat that all of that info here. The author did a great job of explaining the "magic" (thelemety) as simply as possible so a complicated subject could make sense to the reader. This is a story of science, magic, battle strategy and saving Earth and what's left of humanity after centuries of war with the aliens. It definitely kept me riveted. I look forward to reading more of his books and really hope he continues this story as a series. I received an ARC copy of this book from First to Read in exchange for an honest review.

An unexpected treasure with wonderful characters and a strange but totally believable and consistent world-view. It ended too soon! - hungry for more.

The story is a little slow to pick up, but once it does it's a great read. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

About the author

J. Patrick Black has worked as a bartender, a small-town lawyer, a home builder, and a costumed theme-park character, all while living a secret double life as a fiction writer. While fiction is now his profession, he still finds occasion to ply his other trades as well. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he likes to visit the ocean. Ninth City Burning is his first novel.